Hello everyone.  I've been off-line for a month and a half because of
problems associated with an office move, but am finally back.  Just a
little warning to y'all:  if you're going to be offline for any length of
time, make sure you send that little "no mail" command to the listserv.
When I finally got my e-mail, I had 1772 messages waiting for me from
museum-l and museum-ed!  You guys sure haven't been idle in my absence.

Anyway, back to business:

At the Science Museum of Minnesota we're prototyping a combined
classroom/exhibit space in one of our exhibit halls.  This is not a
discovery room. It will be a multi-use space that can be reserved for
chunks of time, but will be open as exhibit/activity space when not
reserved. The space will hold approximately 30-50 people comfortably.
Examples of "reserved" uses would be school class orientation for focused
fieldtrips (i.e. spending their time focusing on that exhibit hall, not
running to do the whole museum), pre-visit orientation for groups of
teachers, continuing education classes related to the theme of the exhibit
hall, sessions/workshops during conferences, etc.

The space will contain several visible collection storage cabinets
(collections are visible but not touchable), round tables with padded
stools, white board, bulletin board, and "stuff" to maintain the ambience
of the exhibit hall.

The space is at a dead-end of an exhibit, so it can be easily closed off
during reserved times.  One of our main goals is to make sure this space
isn't dead when it's not reserved.  To this end, we are planning to use
only temporary "walls", which may end up being anything from a clear
plastic curtain to those sliding glass doors they use to close mall stores
after hours (we want the walls to be clear so other visitors can tell that
it's not just a space closed to them, but that it's actually being used).
These "walls" will be slid open and out of the way when the space is not
reserved.  Also, the tables that will be placed in the space will, in
non-reserved times, have tabletop activities of sorts.  In addition, this
space is currently host to two theater performances which will continue to
take place.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has had any experience with multi-use
spaces like this.  Any suggestions, advice, warnings, recommendations would
be very helpful.  We're definitely looking at this as a prototype, and are
expecting to change things as we see they are needed.

Thanks,
Bill